The days pass and Pope Leo XIV continues to carry out the travel program with admirable dedication after the not insignificant scare of lung cancer; let us hope he can keep this up and live his return to America with enthusiasm. The most delicate high-altitude stages in Peru remain. We are on the last Argentine day and the first Peruvian one: prison in the morning, Luján mid-morning, and Lima in the afternoon. From yesterday, Córdoba remains, which has provided the best material of the trip: an Ignatian phrase turned into an institutional mea culpa by removing two words, a quote from Francis published under Leo’s signature, a balcony from which three different papal quotes have emerged, and a number that is now a series. The themes center on America, and we have gone eight days without a single ongoing conflict being mentioned.
Devoto, Luján, and a president who may not be there when he leaves
The day, according to the official program: visit to the Federal Penitentiary Complex of Buenos Aires with a greeting, Mass with homily in the square in front of the Basilica of Luján, farewell at Ministro Pistarini Airport, flight to Lima, welcome at Callao, welcome ceremony at the Government Palace, visit to the President of the Republic, and meeting with authorities at the Gran Teatro Nacional.
Regarding the prison, it must be said what is planned and what is not, because the Argentine media contradict one another: the program foresees a greeting, not a Mass, and so far no one has published anything else. It is the Villa Devoto prison, which is closing: the resolution ordering its relocation also extended the prison emergency declared in 2019 for two more years, and the emptying toward Marcos Paz began on October 11. There had previously been a spiritual retreat in the prison, and the Prison Pastoral Ministry chose those who would give testimony; its executive secretary, María Patricia Alonso, speaks: “Many did not feel worthy,” and they ended up understanding “that, despite being imprisoned, they do not lose their dignity.”
A fact that no one has put into circulation and that sets the scene: John Paul II did not enter any Argentine prison in 1987: he addressed the inmates by radio and television from the Nunciature. If the program is followed, it will be the first time a Pope sets foot in a prison in Argentina. Bergoglio did go to Devoto, but as archbishop.
And in Lima there are two things the Italian press is not reporting. The first is who is receiving him: Keiko Fujimori, president since July 28 for the 2026-2031 term, elected in June by fewer than fifty thousand votes. The second is that he arrives in a city under a state of emergency: the state of emergency in Lima and Callao was extended sixty days on October 28, with freedom of assembly restricted and prior administrative authorization required for large-scale religious activities. The Pope’s Masses in Lima require permission. And a third, which will be resolved today: Fujimori has asked the Senate for permission to travel to China and Japan from November 15 to 21, so she would be out of the country during the final events of the trip. Congress was debating it this morning.
Eight days, no conflict, and a minute of silence
We close the account of the Argentine leg, text by text. In none of the nine speeches and homilies published from Uruguay and Argentina is Ukraine, Gaza, Palestine, Sudan, Haiti, or the Middle East mentioned. The word “war” has appeared four times and none points to an ongoing conflict: two at Palacio San Martín—“the idol of war” and the “without wars” of the prayer of Fratelli tutti—one on November 7 in Montevideo and one in Córdoba, where it is also historic, naming the martyrs of the Spanish Civil War. “Weapons,” in Córdoba, is metaphorical: “with no other weapons than the crucifix and the holy rosary.”
The closest he has come to the matter is not a phrase but a gesture, and it is recorded in the official chronicle: at Palacio San Martín he lit a candle and observed a minute of silence for peace, without a specific addressee.
And there is a mirror worth looking at, because today he goes to Luján. John Paul II preached there on June 11, 1982, in the midst of the Falklands War, and he did not name the war either: he invoked the Virgin as “Queen of Peace” and asked “that through your intercession, O Queen of Peace, ways may be found for the solution of the present conflict.” The present conflict. Forty-four years later, in the same atrium, the procedure has not changed. Incidentally, two clarifications about Luján: that homily does not call her patroness of Argentina, but “shrine of the Argentine nation,” and the patronage, which the Argentine Government attributes to Pius XI in 1930, is asserted without citing a document. The only coronation on the program for this trip is the one on Saturday in Chiclayo.
The massive youth vigil
The figures are no longer an anecdote of one day; they are a series of three. Yesterday we counted two and a half million for the Buenos Aires Mass, attributing them to local authorities, and Vatican News in Spanish published them in its own voice. For the youth vigil, the Bollettino writes “si estima abbiano partecipato circa un milione di persone”: this time neither local authorities nor anyone else, an estimate without an owner. And EFE closes the circle by returning the million “as confirmed by the Vatican.” For the Córdoba Mass, the Bollettino does attribute: six hundred fifty thousand “secondo le autorità locali”. But Vatican News in Spanish again loses the attribution and EFE attributes the same number to “sources from the organizers” cited by the Vatican. EWTN presents it as a Vatican estimate confirmed by the authorities, and Quotidiano Nazionale prints six hundred thousand. Three incompatible attributions for a single figure. For today’s Mass in Luján, one and a half million, two million, and three or four million are already circulating, depending on who is speaking.
The meeting with the bishops
The Córdoba meeting with bishops, priests, religious, seminarians, and pastoral agents has left the headline that has been repeated the most, SIR headlines “riconoscere con coraggio in cosa non siamo stati fedeli”. The text says “let us have the courage to clearly recognize in what we have not been faithful to God and to place it before his mercy”. The entire speech is built on the first week of the Exercises of St. Ignatius, and two sentences earlier it says “we need to examine our conscience, go to confession, and keep the humility of allowing ourselves to be corrected,” and even earlier it warns against “learning to justify everything, finding ‘pastoral reasons.’” It is a personal examination of conscience. When cut as SIR cuts it, it reads like an institutional mea culpa, which is precisely what it is not. The words abuse, abuses, victims, minors, or cover-up do not appear in the text. They did not appear either in the Vespers with the episcopate the previous day. Two days speaking to the entire Argentine clergy, two days without that word, and with five victims received in private.
A quote from Francis with Leo’s signature
From the same speech comes the phrase that has gone around America: “the Church is not a business, it is not a humanitarian agency, the Church is not an NGO.” RPP headlines it as a statement by Leo XIV, and with it half a dozen Argentine media outlets. It is not: the Pope introduces it by saying “my dear predecessor expressed it with particular clarity” and refers to a catechesis by Francis from October 2013. Of all those who have used it as a headline, only one attributes it correctly.
The same with “make a mess,” which is also borrowed and also declared: “dream of a Church that continues to make a mess, as your fellow countryman Francis asked you!” Note the “your fellow countryman”: he speaks of Pope Francis as a compatriot of the Argentines, not his own. And a warning about location, because two events have been crossed here: neither that phrase nor the one about the NGO was said at the youth vigil, but in the afternoon in Córdoba, before the clergy. The headline that links them in an arc, “from ‘make a mess’ to ‘go and announce!’”, connects two speeches separated by a flight.
What the Pope did and did not do, said and did not say
ANSA headlined the day as the trip to the city where Bergoglio “era stato esiliato dagli stessi gesuiti” and Avvenire as “la città della notte oscura di Bergoglio”. The framing is entirely from the media. The Pope did not visit the Jesuit residence—the itinerary in the official chronicle goes from the airport to the Mass, from the Mass to the Archbishop’s House, and from there to the cathedral—did not pronounce the word Bergoglio in either of the day’s two texts, and did not say a single sentence about those two years. He spoke of St. Ignatius and the saints of Córdoba.
The Society itself places his stay at the Residencia Mayor between July 1990 and May 1992, in room number 5, with a window onto Caseros Street, and says that his return was arranged by his superiors “in a kind of exile.” The word exile is Bergoglio’s own, later collected by biographers; no Jesuit document uses it. And there is a detail no one has noticed: the superior of that house who signs those statements is Father Ángel Rossi, who is today Cardinal Ángel Sixto Rossi, Archbishop of Córdoba, who yesterday welcomed the Pope in the cathedral. At midday the Pope appeared on the balcony of the Archbishop’s House, something that the official chronicle records as “un breve saluto” and that was not on the program.
The idols of the young
The evening vigil, at the same Monumento de los Españoles where he said Mass on Monday, has two official texts and not one: the speech and, separately, the answers to the young people’s questions. Almost no one has published the latter. ANSA headlines “non vi inginocchiate davanti agli idoli”, which is not literal: its own body carries the good phrase. The text says “¡no se arrodillen ante aquello que no puede darles vida!”, and the complement matters, because it is not a list of idols but a definition.
And the idols of the vigil are not those of Palacio San Martín. There they were three and of political weight: dominion, vainglory, and war. Here they are others and more domestic: success at any cost, money, obsession with appearance, popularity, the unbridled pursuit of pleasure. Two catalogs for two audiences, and the contrast says more than the continuity. There were four testimonies and two questions, and it closes with a litany copied from the canticle of Daniel—“art and culture, bless the Lord,” “networks and screens, bless the Lord,” “music and football, bless the Lord.” From there has come the framing of the pope as a pop star, which compresses the verses of Daniel.
The Vatican responds without saying who chose the victims
Yesterday we reported that the Pope’s meeting with five abuse victims does not appear in the Bollettino and that Ending Clergy Abuse had denounced the exclusion of the victims of the Próvolo Institute and the Opus Dei whistleblowers. The Holy See has responded, and the response is instructive for what it does not say. The communiqué is signed by the director of the Sala Stampa, Matteo Bruni, and does not name Próvolo, nor the Opus Dei whistleblowers, nor acknowledge that both groups had requested to be received: it speaks generically of the other victims it was not possible to find. Selection criterion, none. And there is a change of verb worth noting: from “presented by the local Church” it has moved to “individuate e selezionate dalla Chiesa locale”. Identified and selected. That is, the Holy See admits in writing that there was a screening and attributes it to the local Church without saying who the local Church is. The meeting, by the way, still does not appear in the bulletin of the 9th, the 10th, or the 11th.
ECA has replied at a press conference that it will ask the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors and the Pope himself to be informed of who chose and by what criterion, and one of the Opus Dei whistleblowers, Andrea Martínez, sums up the matter: “We will not lower our arms until we are received.” And this does not end in Argentina. We published it on Sunday in the Italian edition: José Enrique Escardó, the first public whistleblower of the Sodalicio, maintains that the nuncio in Peru and the president of the Peruvian episcopate are leaving him out of the meeting with Sodalicio victims, which he places on Saturday in Chiclayo and which he says he learned about from a foreign journalist. The official Peruvian program does not include any meeting with victims. More than thirty delivered a letter to the nunciature in Lima requesting an audience, and the decree of suppression of the Sodalicio, signed in April 2025, has never been published: what the victims ask for, in addition to an audience, is to read it.
Héctor Aguer has died with the Pope in Argentina
Yesterday, at the age of eighty-three, the archbishop emeritus of La Plata died, while the Pope was in Córdoba. On Sunday we published his last interview, and it turned out to be the last in the strict sense: he asked for the repeal of Traditionis custodes, spoke of empty seminaries and convents, said that the Pope “does not come to take sides for any leader” and explained that his health would prevent him from seeing him. He said it two days before dying and four hundred kilometers from where the Pope was saying Mass. He governed La Plata from 2000 and his resignation was accepted by Francis on June 2, 2018, in the same act in which he named Víctor Manuel Fernández as successor. The archbishop who has just asked for the repeal of Traditionis custodes was replaced, eight years ago, by the man who today signs the decrees of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. The funeral will be presided over by the current archbishop of La Plata, Gustavo Carrara.
Abuses in the Vatican: from “nothing was done” to “it was ignored”
And a laboratory case on how a news story is manufactured. A Sardinian outlet headlines that Cardinal Becciu informed the Pope about abuses against religious sisters “e fu ignorato”. The origin is an interview with Lucetta Scaraffia published on October 28, thirteen days earlier, which no outlet with an editorial staff has picked up. Scaraffia directed Donne Chiesa Mondo; the February 2019 issue denounced abuses against religious sisters; its eleven editors resigned en bloc in March, and Pope Francis publicly admitted the problem on the flight from Abu Dhabi. The new information has no document, date, or second witness behind it, and the chronology is tight: Becciu ceased to be Substitute on June 29, 2018, eight months before that issue. There is also a more serious element in the interview that was not in her own 2019 article, where she wrote about imposed abortions without mentioning ecclesiastical funding.
The full text of Zen, and the criticism of Pope Francis
It can now be read in full, in an unofficial Italian translation, and what has circulated these days was the soft part. There are seven sections, from (A) to (G), and the phrase no one has put in quotation marks is this: “unfortunately, in these last years we have had as supreme head of our Church someone who, while proclaiming the great validity of the Second Vatican Council, was in fact not faithful to its decrees.” And immediately afterward: “he has destroyed many good things built by his predecessors.” Of Francis he also says that his goodness and his predilection for the poor “lacked balance” and that he seemed to believe that out of compassion one could even compromise with the truth. And at the end he does something that should not be overlooked: after asking for the removal of three cardinals, he closes by praying for the reigning Pope with the verse of the Oremus pro Pontifice, “May the Lord preserve him, give him life, and make him happy on earth.”
He asserts that Pope Francis abolished the Synod of Bishops instituted by Paul VI and replaced it with “a democratic consultation of the entire People of God.” The reality is that it was not abolished in fact. The official page of the Synod itself says that Episcopalis communio, of September 15, 2018, “has profoundly renewed the Synod of Bishops”, which continues to exist under that name. What Zen describes as abolition is the admission of non-bishop members with a vote, a transformation that can undoubtedly be judged substantial, but which is not a suppression.
He maintains that Pope Francis’s letter to Fernández upon naming him prefect entrusted him with something different from the defense of doctrine. The letter, dated July 1, 2023, says that the Dicastery “in other times came to use immoral methods”, that “there were times when, rather than promoting theological knowledge, possible doctrinal errors were pursued,” and then: “what I expect from you is undoubtedly something very different.” That same letter maintains as its central purpose “to safeguard the teaching that flows from the faith” and “to guard the faith,” but an attempt is made to twist what this means.
Müller, Latin in St. Peter’s
The interview circulating these days is by Raymond Arroyo, on EWTN’s The World Over, recorded in Washington. Of what Müller says, almost everything he has said before—in February he already warned that some bishops are pushing traditionalists toward the Fraternity—but there is a formulation worth keeping: one must avoid “relativism in doctrine and absolutism in discipline.” “Some use the liturgy to demonstrate power” and that “this authoritarianism is not Catholic,” and telling the faithful that if they do not accept the new form they should stay home or go with the Lefebvrians “is not a Catholic understanding.” Of the “spectacle” with which Cardinal Cupich described the traditional Mass, he responds that “it is absurd to say that the saints and the popes of yesteryear were interested in a spectacle.” What he adds anew is that he extends the argument to the interreligious sphere and to the Muslim prayer room in the Apostolic Library, which he calls self-relativization of the faith: here it must be remembered that we verified that a year ago and the response was “it is real, but…”.
Wrapping up the day
One thing about curial nomenclature that we have been seeing misquoted for weeks. The prefect of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts has been, since March 25, Monsignor Anthony Randazzo, until then bishop of Broken Bay, and the secretary has been Marco Mellino since June 30. Juan Ignacio Arrieta is, therefore, the former secretary, and half the press continues to cite him in the position. With an aggravating factor: the official structure page of the dicastery itself continues to list Arrieta as secretary. Before, these things did not happen in the Vatican and we did not have computer systems that reviewed them.
Of the Lefebvrian dossier, little new: what has been circulating these days about tensions between dicasteries is a follow-up to Guido Horst’s report of October 30, which we already reported on November 3, this time disseminated by the Fraternity itself while its appeal remains unresolved.
And a note on the sources of these two days, because it has cost us work. The texts of November 10—the Córdoba homily, the speech to the clergy, and the vigil speech—are announced in the Bollettino, which marks them as originals in Spanish, and the vatican.va pages to which its own index refers return an error. It is the third episode of the trip: the speech at Palacio Libertad was also marked as original Spanish and its Spanish page was not served. The citations in this bulletin therefore come from reproductions, and we say so.
Today, the memorial of St. Martin of Tours, who is also patron of the city of Buenos Aires, as the very municipal ordinance that sets his feast today takes for granted. The Pope leaves Buenos Aires on the day of its patron, and the Gospel is that of the ten lepers, of whom only one returns to give thanks and he is the foreigner.
“Rise and go; your faith has saved you.”